Category Archives: Parenting

December 4, 2010 · 9:50 am

Meet Baby Ron and Baby Vanessa

Baby Ron, Baby Annabel and Baby Vanessa

OUR two-year-old daughter is freaking me out a little. Or rather, her plastic pals are. Meet Ron, Annabel and Vanessa.

They sleep at the end of Bonnie’s bed, topping and tailing like we did as kids, in the days before ready-beds and futons.

Often when I go into check on the kids on my way up to bed, the terrifying triplets make me jump. By doing nothing more than lying there, staring vacantly, plastic eyes glinting.

Baby Ron and Baby Vanessa are twin dolls given when Bonn was just a few months old and not even vaguely interested in anything except eating and sleeping. They were recently pulled out of one of far-too-many toy-boxes and adopted by Bonnie. “My babies. My sisters,” she burbles away to herself, dragging them around, upside down, by their ankles.

They aren’t exactly cuddly dolls, being of the cheap plastic variety with stiff movement at the hips and shoulders. Baby Annabel is a little posher, arriving a couple of Christmases ago, but she weighs too much for a two-year-old to carry easily. She makes weird noises but thankfully can be ‘put down for a nap’ by flicking a switch hidden in her battery pack.

Baby Annabel’s name is a given – she arrived with it – but what about Vanessa and Ron? Not exactly ‘child-like’ names.

Seven-year-old Billy thinks he came up with Ron’s name. Why Ron? “Cos it’s a boy’s name,” he explained, as if I were a little dim.

And Vanessa? We don’t know any Vanessas. It’s not even an easy name for a two-year-old to say. I’m baffled.

Still, her favoured toy pals have more easily explained names, and are soft enough to be allowed to sleep at her end of the bed. There’s Pom the ragdoll (her dress has apples on it, French for apple is pomme, (how middle class)), Arthur the Rabbit (‘R-for-Rabbit, geddit?) and One-Eye, the bear with, er, one eye. Sometimes it’s best to keep things simple. . .

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December 3, 2010 · 8:45 am

Mixed messages from School-land

 A MIXTURE of messages from our various schools this week that amaze and frustrate me.

Pity the primary school headteacher, who has to send messages home in the weekly newsletter reminding parents to make their children wear a coat to school.

Yes, there are actually some parents out there who think it’s alright for their under 11s to play out in below freezing weather in just their polo-shirt and perhaps a sweatshirt. Don’t tell me that there’s no point, because they won’t wear it. MAKE them wear it!

The latest messages are about breakfast. Apparently, some parents of primary age children arrive at school at 8.50am claiming to be hungry because they haven’t eaten. Again, who is the grown-up who is supposed to be responsible for these children? I don’t care if you say they won’t eat breakfast. Shove a piece of toast or a banana in their hand. Stop giving them cash to buy crappy energy drinks at the shop. Take responsibility!

Meanwhile, one of my older children’s schools has a habit of summoning everyone in for meetings every five minutes. If you don’t go, you feel like a Bad Parent. This week it’s about a school trip that might happen in a year’s time but they aren’t saying how much it’s going to cost. Not even a rough guess. Nope, they want you to arrange a sitter and turn up at 7pm (tonight) for a meeting about it. I’m sorry, but I think I can make a decision based on a letter, or even an email, with the same information, should you be inclined to send one detailing the cost. Please, stop assuming all parents can just drop everything and scuttle along to school. We’ve got enough on our plates already.

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December 2, 2010 · 8:26 am

Fibs about phone loss send Ma into frenzy

I’M not very proud of it, but I really lost my rag with our eldest this week. He’s lost his new mobile phone, bought for his 13th birthday just two months ago.

It wasn’t really the phone going missing that triggered the shouting, but the fact he’d lied about it for three days.

I only found out because of a phone call from his minders at the Royal & Derngate Theatre, where he thinks it was lost/stolen. He’d telephoned them to ask if it had been found, and they rang him back on the phone he’d used: mine. Everyone feeling guilty. Me going nuts. Horrible.

What set me raging was not so much about the phone. If he’d told me straight-away, we could have retraced his steps and perhaps have found it. Three days later, no sign. Someone’s had it. Git.

Yes, it feels like a wasted 50-odd quid, and no, it wasn’t insured and the excess on the house insurance is more than it’s worth.

I always tell them, please, please don’t lie, because we’ll always find out and it will make things worse.

But as Bloke pointed out, he’d have been terrified to confess and probably hoped it would be found and no-one needed to know. Which doesn’t make me feel like the greatest parent.

We’ve now re-ordered his sim-card and relegated him back to his un-cool, ancient first phone. Lesson learned, painfully. If you do happen to find a black Samsung Tocco Lite, do get in touch.

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November 26, 2010 · 9:15 am

What’s a funeral like kids? – “It’s like the Simpsons”

 “ACTUALLY Mum, this is the second funeral I’ve been to,” said seven-year-old Billy, correcting my statement to an elderly relative at the gates of the cemetery. “I went to Uncle Joe’s, when I was a baby.”

And he wandered off to see if he could balance on the kerb alongside his fidgeting siblings.

I’d been explaining that seeing off their great-great Aunty Mary was the first time our children had been to a funeral, and how I hoped it wasn’t going to upset anyone.

We’d already been through the actual death part a week before, when I had the inevitable call that my 92-year-old great aunt had passed away. They said right away that they wanted to go to her funeral.

My great Aunty Mary was the last surviving relative of that generation across both sides of our families. Neither Bloke or I have any grandparents. They died more than a decade ago. So Aunty Mary and, until he died in 2004, her twin brother Uncle Joe, had been the only genuinely old relatives our children had ever known.

We had always visited her in her flat each time we headed to Newcastle to visit Grandma and Grandad.

They had smiled through years of cheek-tweaking, never quite being able to fully understand her Geordie accent but happy to accept the biscuits and comics she bought especially for their visits. They sent her drawings and she had photos of them all over her flat.

She had been ill for a while, and we’d detected that things weren’t well last May when she sent 11-year old Dougie a pink glittery birthday card for an eight-year-old girl. She still wrote ‘to Dougie’ inside, so she wasn’t completely do-lally.

When she died Billy was full of questions. We’d had a conversation when he had a phase of waking up crying about death some months ago. I had to remember what I’d said.

In a nutshell, I explained how she’d been poorly because her body had just got worn out, and that she was very, very old. And that some people thought that when you died, your soul, or your spirit went somewhere else where they met up with all the people they’d loved who had also died. I told him that when he was a baby, he’d been with me to a funeral for Uncle Joe, and that people had been sad because they weren’t going to see Joe again, but that Billy had cheered them up.

Then the older boys started asking about the funeral. Would they get to chuck soil into the grave? When the cremation happened, did you actually see the fire? Obviously, their only references came from films and TV and the rampant imaginations of teen boys.

I explained how at cremations they usually brought the coffin into the church first and then had a service to remember all the brilliant things about Aunty Mary.

I said that people, including me and their grandparents, might get upset and may even cry, but that was just what happened at funerals because people who loved someone were often sad to say goodbye and that everyone reacts in different ways.

Then I explained that an automatic curtain would probably pull around the coffin at the end. “Ah,” said Dougie. “Like in the Simpsons.”

The funeral went really well. They children all behaved brilliantly (although Bonnie was bribed with iced gem biscuits which she squished into the chair). One of their junior cousins shouted a huge ‘Hurray!” after the vicar’s final “Amen”, which lightened the mood somewhat.

"Oh, we only meet at christenings, weddings and funerals"

Afterwards we had a wake at my parents’ house and the children got to met lots of relatives they couldn’t remember.

Bonnie found a new cousin Freya, (my cousin’s daughter), from Ireland, and the pair of them spent the afternoon looking suspiciously at each other or giggling and running around bonkers.

 Thankfully, everyone seemed relieved there were children there.

I know Aunty Mary would have been delighted.

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November 25, 2010 · 8:30 am

The travel was more painful than the funeral

THE worst part of attending a funeral last Friday wasn’t the grief, but the travel involved.

It took four and a half hours to get to Newcastle, driving in thick fog, and a ridiculous six hours to get back, thanks to rush hour traffic and several ‘phantom’ jams (where there appears to be no physical reason for the hold-up, like an accident or roadworks).

Considering they were cooped up for such a long time, the kids stayed remarkably sane. “There’s no point shouting at the other drivers Mum, they can’t hear you,” muttered eldest son as I ranted endlessly about the idiot drivers without lights on in pea-soup conditions.

We only had to stop once each way for loo breaks and cake bribes, and Bonnie was persuaded to regress a few months back into a pull-up nappy in case of accidents. We got home, exhausted, at around 10pm. Ever since I’ve felt I need a hip and knee transplant due to the dodgy Corsa driving position.

We had decided not to stay over in Newcastle because Bloke is still working away and was only coming home for the weekend. He was due to fly from Belfast to Birmingham, and a train home should have seen him back by 7pm.

That was before the transplant plane crash at Birmingham which closed the runways.

After getting the only flight available, to Gatwick, getting a train into London, another to Northampton, and a cab, he was home just before 11pm.

Which of course meant he had absolutely no sympathy for my own epic journey. Bloody typical.

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November 21, 2010 · 9:00 am

The taxi-driving life of the Luvvie Mother

 THREE years ago our two eldest sons got the parts of John and Michael Darling in Peter Pan at Derngate, Northampton, alongside David Essex.

Jed and Dougie were aged just ten and eight, I was heavily pregnant with Bonnie, and Billy was only just four. After a month or more of ferrying them all back and forth from rehearsals and shows, over Christmas, we were all completely knackered.

And I decided then that it had been a brilliant experience, but we wouldn’t do it again.

Jed and Dougie in Peter Pan with David Essex, Christmas 2007

Fast forward a couple of years and we appear, somehow, er, to be doing it all over again.

This time in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, next door at the Royal Theatre.

Its different. Slightly.

The boys aren’t principal characters with lines, but part of the larger chorus. They are also, obviously, older and more independent.

So how do you suddenly find yourself as the parent of ‘performers’? Isn’t that the mark of the ultimate in pushy-parents? The uber-pushy?

Well no, actually, this has very little to do with us. Honest.

Jed has been part of Northampton’s County Youth Theatre group, which meets every Saturday at Clare Street, for years. Then Dougie joined too, and in a bizarrely casual way they caught the performing bug and wanted to audition for everything they could.

Usually I say no.

However, when they came home asking to audition at the Royal, I wavered.

It’s the Royal’s Christmas show (never call it panto), which I’ve actually been reviewing for the Chron for about the last 12 years, ever since the days of Michael Napier Brown and Vilma Hollingberry (that’ll show your age).

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is being directed by Dani Parr, who I’ve met a few times through her shows for kids, including Where’s the Bear and Flathampton.

So when auditions came around in late summer, I relented.

They auditioned over a weekend alongside a hundred or more other kids (most of whom wore ankle warmers and ‘jazz shoes,’ while my pair wore muddy trainers).

It’s a peculiar experience, the child-actor audition. There’s a lot of waiting around, and everyone has a number. Mostly you’re in and out, and unless they tell you to hang around, you know fairly quickly if they’ve been rejected.

At the end of this one, they called dozens of numbers and took those delighted children away.

We all assumed ours hadn’t got in and got ready to console them and bribe them back to happiness with promises of pizza. But agonisingly, those called out hadn’t got through, and there were more tears than at an X-Factor sing-off.

Rejection is the really tough bit for both children and parents to handle. Beforehand, rather than telling them how brilliant they are, you have to keep reminding them that they might not be chosen – because they are too young, to old, too fair, too dark, whatever you can think of – so the blow is cushioned. At the auditions I saw one parent really losing her rag with the stage manager, loudly demanding to know why her child wasn’t chosen. It was painful.

If chosen, there’s lots of form filling, and laying out of rules. There’s no payment, one pair of free tickets, and you must be on time and available for two months.

You have to get written permission from their headteacher for them to be out of school for some days in December when they’re doing matinee shows – which doesn’t often go down well.

Rehearsals began over half-term, and have continued at least one school night and Saturday or Sunday since. Towards the opening night, on November 30, they rehearse just about every evening and some days.

But they’re loving it. They’ve learned fight scenes with the ‘proper’ actors and a ‘proper’ fight director . They tell me they are playing a hippogryph and a satyr (I had to look it up).

They’re also evacuees, reindeer and baddies. “I’m an imp baddie, and Doug’s an ape baddie, so he doesn’t need make-up,” said Jed, before being tackled to the floor. By the ape.

It’s a relentless schedule. Jed and Doug are doing 22 shows between December 3 and January 8, including Christmas Eve and Boxing Day. But they are one of three junior casts doing a whopping 66 performances. At least this time, they aren’t doing matinees and evening shows on the same day, and get some days off. It’s an extraordinary thing for the theatres to organise.

For the parent, it’s nerve-wracking and a little isolating. You hand them over to chaperones for the fun part and just feel like chief taxi-driver and sandwich-maker. You also have a life and other kids to make feel just as special. The evening shows and rehearsals can finish late, and in our case, with Bloke working away, this means relying on the kindness of a friend down the road to pop up and babysit, or too frequently, putting the sleepy siblings into the car on the PJs. It’s not ideal.

If your child does show a leaning towards performing arts, it’s important to be both encouraging and grounded. Being in theatre shows is a brilliant ways to boost confidence, learn skills and make friends, and it certainly shouldn’t be seen as a step to instant fame and fortune.

If any of my lot want to tread the boards full-time when they’re older, that’s fine. But while they’re still kids, I’d like them to have a normal life and a childhood.

And maybe you have kids who prefer to sit in a comfy theatre seat and watch others dress-up in funny costumes. That’s our Billy’s plan anyway. . .

 • Tickets for the Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe are on sale at Royal&Derngate, via the website or box office, on Northampton 624811.

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November 12, 2010 · 8:39 am

Welcome to Autumn Sick Week. *sniff

IT’S officially Autumn Sick Week. No really, it’s A Thing. At this point in the school year, pupils and students start dropping like flies. Sick flies.

It’s got lots to do with timing. The weather turns cold and wet. Yet anyone still living with their parents refuses to go out in anything more than shirt sleeves. Then they come home to centrally-heated homes which circulate dry, warm, dusty air.

It’s just after half-term, when everyone has confused their immune systems with lie-ins and changing clocks. Thenthey get tipped back into the bug-soup of school or university.

A year ago at my part-time job at the university, someone warned me about this particular phenomenon. “Don’t get to settled thinking you’ve got good attendance rates, they’re about to plummet.” And sure enough, the students became less numerous. I thought it was just that they’d sussed me out and decided my waffling wasn’t worth getting out of bed for.

However, true enough, after a couple of erratic weeks the classes drifted back to normal sizes.

This November too, my mailbox is littered with excuses for non attendance (I’ve got stricter). They’re all ill and “going to the doctors.” Yeah, yeah, you’ve got a cold.

When two-year-old Bonnie became uncooperative and downright whingy at the end of last week, I should have twigged. She was, to use medical parlance, ‘going down with something’.

Sure enough, after a couple of days inexplicable whining, over the weekend she became the snot monster. Uncharacteristically clinging to my knee and depositing snail-trails of nose juice all over my clothes. Refusing food at mealtimes but demanding ‘jooce’ and ‘toaaast’ at sporadic intervals.

“I poorly,” she announced to anyone who tried to change her plan to lie on the living-room floor watching endless re-runs of Peppa Pig.

When children are ill, there’s often little more you can do than dose them up with Calpol, keep them warm if their cold and cool if their hot, make sure they drink regularly and cuddle them if they’ll let you.

Bonnie only usually wants cuddles if you’re hugging someone else. But when she’s ill she wants cuddles everytime she wakes in the night (which at the time of going to press was about 15 times a night). I put vapour rub in a bowl of warm water on a heater (out of her reach) to help her breathe, and resign myself to several nights of broken sleep. It’s like having a newborn in the house again.

You do have the option of calling the NeneDoc out of hours doctor’s service if your child’s temperature gets high and won’t come down with liquid paracetamol and fewer bed covers. But thankfully, most children are over the worst of a cold or a bug within a couple of days.

And of course, once they’re feeling better, that’s when everyone else in the house catches it, one-by-one. The tissues pile up and you’re forced to re-arrange your working hours to cope.

I’m anticipating my own cold will be caught in about a week’s time, just when I’ve taken on my busiest schedule of work this year. Ho hum.

Oh, and did I mention this is also a point in the calendar when everyone starts bringing home nits again?

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November 10, 2010 · 2:26 pm

Firework fun? Or just standing around cold and wet?

FOR the first time in a couple of years, I succumbed to the offspring’s nagging to go to an organised firework display.

My usual objection is that it always seems to rain, or be the coldest night on record, or that there’s something better we could be doing, like watching TV, in the warm.

There’s the other issue of not knowing how smaller kids will react. As a toddler Dougie had the screaming ab-dabs at a cub firework display and we had to head home sharpish. He’s 11 now and loves ’em.

Living in a town centre rather than a village makes a difference. While many villages have a pleasant community event, with soup and sparklers and a bar nearby, us townies have to settle for endless pyrotechnics and the sound of gunpowder for two weeks leading up to and after November 5.

Quite frankly, it takes the fun out of fireworks when the squeals and blasts go off every night, all night, and wake up your kids.

However, there was an organised Fireworks Do at Casuals Rugby Club, where the boys play, so I relented.

As I stood for what felt like hours with our rain-soaked seven-year-old beside the dripping pushchair which held our indignant-to-be-strapped-in two-year-old, as our drenched eldest sons played football in the mud, I remembered again why I don’t do Bonfire Night. It’s cold, and wet, and boring.

Then the fireworks started. Youngest two instantly covered ears and eyes, until they were cajoled to look at the amazing sight of stars and colours and sparkles of light bursting in the sky above us. It was ten minutes of whizz-banging joy to make up for all the discomfort and waiting.

No one minded the journey home in a damp and muddy car, and there’s something to be said for the pleasure of getting back to a warm house and into warm clothes.

Next year though, I’m definitely staying indoors.

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November 6, 2010 · 9:18 am

E for effort: the painful process of teaching British university students

AS there’s plenty of chat about university places at the moment, I thought I’d dig out a column from earlier in the year featuring some of my beloved former students:

FOR the past few weeks I’ve been marking exam papers. And it’s made me realise how much of a under-used skill spelling seems to have become.

I appreciate the fact I’m a journalist, writing in the ‘Chronical'[SIC]. Being fussy about spelling errors.

But there’s a difference between the occasional typing error or misplaced comma, and the apparent lack of effort by people who are supposed to be in the top percentage of learners – university students.

I know, I know, it means you’re getting old when you start moaning about how badly young people are educated ‘these days.’

However, I know as a parent of primary age children that they still have weekly spelling tests and are expected to learn them.

So what happens after that? Do secondary schools mark down homework and coursework for incorrect spelling? Why do seemingly intelligent teenagers with reasonable A Level grades arrive at higher education with such a poor grasp of grammar? And then expect to get degrees in ‘writing’ subjects like English and journalism?

It’s not all of them, of course. Across the classes there are many whose use of English is perfect. More often than not, the ones who spell correctly are from overseas.

Mature students, and those with dyslexia, also tend to produce work that has been corrected.

Those who don’t bother tend to be late teens, early 20s, and British. It’s not just their work, their entire communication is full of errors.

I don’t agree that it’s texting which has perpetuated this laziness with English. After all, most use predictive text which spells words for you. Today’s students spend their entire lives talking to each other via instant messaging, texts, email and tweets.

Mostly I blame ‘It Doesn’t Matter’ syndrome. It’s just a quick post on Twitter, so it dunt matta. I’m just replying to someone on Facebook, so it’s informal. Teens will always stick two fingers up to the oldies by vandalising language.

And that’s fine, in their own time. But not when you want me to mark your impossible-to-decipher essay.

So how to fix it? This wasn’t just a handful of teens who didn’t know the difference between their, there, and they’re. This was the majority.

Most common offences seem to be the disregard of all capital letters, at the beginning of sentences or for proper names. Then there are words that sound similar but they can’t decide which to use and can’t be bothered to check. And apostrophes? Stuck in anywhere! (Mostly for plurals, or should I say, plural’s)

One of the first things I insisted on was that any emails sent to me had to be spell-checked, with capital letters in the right places and correct use of apostrophes, or I wouldn’t read them. Then they had to proof-read each other’s work in class, which bored them rigid and made them at least hit the spell-check button more regularly. And it has improved. One girl admitted she simply hadn’t noticed how badly she communicated. Another was delighted when he finally understood when to put an apostrophe in “it’s.”

I find it disrespectful to receive communication where people can’t even be bothered to put a capital letter on their OWN name, let alone mine. Is it really so hard to type the word you’re unsure of into an online dictionary? Or, heaven forbid, use a REAL dictionary?

So when I’ve been marking work which is littered with errors, it shows they haven’t bothered, so they lose marks. Assignments and exams should be a reflection of your best work, showing off your abilities.

Basic grammar and correct spelling are like table manners. It puts me off if you don’t use them.

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November 5, 2010 · 9:14 am

‘Bring me a Minion!’ (and a cinema booster seat)

The Minions

WE don’t get to the cinema that much as a family, due to Bonnie’s refusal to sit still for more than a few minutes unless Peppa Pig is on screen.

However, after much nagging by the boys, over half-term we went to see the new animation Despicable Me at Cineworld. (Billy and Bonnie have trouble pronouncing ‘despicable.’ So of course, we make them say it as much as possible.)

We have two cinemas in town but tend to always go to the older one at Sixfields, because the parking is so much better and the staff are good. But their top-brass could do with bunging some money at the tired old loos. Yuk.

If you have small people with you at the cinema, make sure you grab a plastic ‘booster’ seat on the way in. It prevents you having to fish out your distressed and doubled-over offspring from the innards of the folding seats when their bottoms inevitably fall through the gap.

The film was great, thanks mostly to the Minions, an army of little yellow pill-shaped workers whose toilet humour and sniggering noises made the kids belly-laugh every time they were on screen.

The basic plot involves grumpy, lonely, wannabe villain, Gru, adopting three little girls, Margo, Edith and Agnes, to use in a sinister plot to steal the moon.

Without becoming Disney-sentimental, it is a poignant and hilariously funny depiction of the modern family, and for once, little girls are the heroes.

We chose the 2D version over the ubiquitous 3D showing, because Bonnie just won’t wear the ill-fitting glasses.

Usually avoiding 3D makes little difference, but when the credits rolled, there was obviously an amazing spell of visual brilliance with the minions (who have names like Mark, Phil, Stuart and Dave) popping out of the screen towards the audience. So if you get a chance to go, it might be worth the battle with the specs.

As we were leaving, Bonnie said: “Mummy, my have min-yin.” (Translation: Mother, get me a minion, now.”)

And while I’m sure she’ll want plenty of minions running about after her when she’s older, for now a toy minion has shot to the top of her letter to Father Christmas.

Let’s just hope he can track down somewhere that actually has them in stock. . .anyone. . ?

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